"Each 'river' is a multivocal symbol with a fan of referents ranging from life values, ethical ideas, and social norms, to grossly physiological processes and phenomena... nowhere else is such a close analogy drawn, even identity made, between these rivers and bodily fluids and emissions...This use of an aspect of human physiology as a model for social, cosmic, and religious ideas and processes is a variant of a widely distributed initiation theme: that the human body is a microcosm of the universe..."–Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 1967

"The vernacular term for it is chinjikijilu, from kupjikijila, 'to blaze a trail,' by cutting marks on a tree with one's ax or by breaking and bending branches to serve as guides back from the unknown bush to known paths. A symbol, then, is a blaze or landmark, something that connects the unknown with the known." –Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 1967

It was a characteristic Marxian transvaluation. The concepts of surplus value squeezed by the capitalistic from labour as profit, centralization of capital with the blind multiplication of techniques and machines, over-production even as the capitalist cut wages to compete—these fundamental principles of Marxian economics were made to serve a crisis theory which served them in turn. –Randolph Starn, Historians and “Crisis,” 1971

“We can hope to conquer disease…we have only to remember that disease happens to man in order not to lose all hope. Magic brings to drugs and incantation rites innumerable resources for generating a profoundly intense desire for cure. Sigerist has noted that Egyptian medicine probably universalized the Eastern experience of parasitic diseases by combining it with the idea of disease-possession: throwing up worms means being restored to health. Disease enters and leaves man as through a door.” -Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 1966




“‘Gosh,’ said Walter, looking at all the smoke, ‘what kind of medicine do they make here?’
‘Wonderful medicine,’ the workman replied, ‘for burning throats and itchy eyes.’
Walter started coughing again. ‘I can get you some,’ the man offered.” -Chris Van Allsburg, Just A Dream, 1990

“And yet there is a strange reluctance on the part of most professional anthropologists to consider seriously the power structure within which their discipline has taken shape.”
-Talal Asad, Anthropology and The Colonial Encounter, 1973

"I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood."-Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment?

"If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of symptoms…To-day neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.”-Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1909

“Visibility is a trap.” Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, 1975